The California Birthday Book eBook

Dear brotherhood of trees! With you
we find
Robust and hearty friendship, free from
all
The laws of petty gods men travail for.
No wrangle here o’er things of small
avail—­
No knavery, nor charity betrayed—­
But comrade beings—­’Stalwart,
steadfast, good.
You help the world in the noblest way
of all—­
By living nobly—­showing in
your lives
The utmost beauty, the full power and
love
That through your wisdom and your long
desire
Thrill in your vibrant veins from heart
of earth.
Open your arms, O Trees, for us who come
With woodland longings in our pilgrim
souls!

RUBY ARCHER.

JULY 8.

The scene was a ravine that had been cloven into the
flank of a mighty mountain as if by the stroke of
a giant’s axe. For about half a mile this
gash ran sharp and narrow; but at the upper end, the
resting place of the travelers, it widened into a
spacious amphitheatre, dotted with palm trees that
rose with clean cylindrical boles sixty to eighty
feet before spreading their crowns of drooping leafage
against the azure of a cloudless sky—­a
wonderful touch of Egypt and the East to surroundings
typical of the American Far West.

EDMUND MITCHELL,
in In Desert Keeping.

The noblest life—­the life of
labor;
The noblest love—­the love of
neighbor.

LORENZO SOSSO,
in Wisdom for the Wise.

JULY 9.

THE LIVE OAKS AT MENLO PARK.

The road wound for some half mile through a stretch
of uncultivated land, dotted with the forms of huge
live-oaks. The grass beneath them was burnt gray
and was brittle and slippery. The massive trees,
some round and compact and so densely leaved that
they were impervious to rain as an umbrella, others
throwing out long, gnarled arms as if spellbound in
some giant throe of pain, cast vast slanting shadows
upon the parched ground. Some seemed, like trees
in Dore’s drawings, to be endowed with a grotesque,
weird humanness of aspect, as though an imprisoned
dryad or gnome were struggling to escape, causing the
mighty trunk to bow and writhe, and sending tremors
of life along each convulsed limb. A mellow hoariness
marked them all, due to their own richly subdued coloring
and the long garlands of silvery moss that hung from
their boughs like an old, rich growth of hair.

GERALDINE BONNER,
in Tomorrow’s Tangle.

JULY 10.

MADRONA.

No other of our trees, to those who know it in its
regions of finest development, makes so strong an
appeal to man’s imagination—­to his
love of color, of joyful bearing, of sense of magic,
of surprise and change. He walks the woods in
June or July and rustles the mass of gold-brown leaves
fresh fallen under foot, or rides for unending weeks
across the Mendocino ranges—­and always with
a sense of fresh interest and stimulation at the varying
presence of this tree.